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He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience--and the truth-- higher than life.

Jostein Gaarder

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Jostein Gaarder
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 8
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Higher
Agreeing
Leave
Appealed
Least
Athens
Truth
Socrates
Done
Valued
Would
Likely
Life
Saved
Conscience
Leniency

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I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
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Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.
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If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.
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going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way
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The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.
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All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good it is civilization which ruins him
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When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.
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It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
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As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
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Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved. There is an answer, even if police do not know it.
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As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.
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When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
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There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won't swap her for any other.
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I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.
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the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents. The more extreme they become, the more powerful the reaction they will have to face.
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Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.
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We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
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If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
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A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
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